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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781615926596 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 662 KB |
About the Author
Anonymous is an expert in a top-level aviation-oversight organization. Andrew R. Thomas (Brecksville, OH) is an accomplished journalist, author, and researcher.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
THE PHENOMENON
OF AIR RAGE
In recent years, public expressions of discontent, despair, and detachment have seemingly become everyday occurrences in our stressed-out and overloaded lives. The explosion and expression of rage in various forms appears to be one of the new realities of twenty-first-century life. Combative, menacing, or nasty individuals can be found almost everywhere. Classrooms, offices, day care centers, airplanes, roadways, and even places of worship have become the unwitting, yet mundane, settings for the anger and frenzied whims of so many disturbed people.
All kinds of industries in every corner of the world have experienced this disconcerting trend. The aviation industry is certainly no exception. Once unthinkable in the days when people traveled in their Sunday best and sipped champagne before takeoff, aggressive, threatening, or dangerous behavior on the part of airline passengers has been chillingly and exponentially on the rise. Further, bad behavior in this industry poses a unique and more complex threat than in most other places.
Surprisingly, according to a recent Gallup Poll on air travel, the majority of commercial airline passengers say they are generally satisfied with the air travel experience. The study found passengers' biggest complaints focused primarily on the practical elements of flying, including leg room and seat width, as well as in-flight food. For most of us who fly, this comes as no surprise.
Yet in the same survey, one-third of all travelers reported they occasionally become enraged at the airlines or airline employees during the process, including almost half of all passengers who fly five times a year or more (see table 1).
Table 1. How often, if ever, have you personally
felt a sense of rage at the airlines or
airline employees when you are flying?
| All | ||||||||
| Frequently Occasionally Never |
|
|
|
| ||||
In an enclosed aircraft, traveling five hundred miles an hour at thirty-three thousand feet, you cannot merely turn your back on a violent, threatening, or uncomfortable situation. If you're walking down the street and see two individuals fighting on the corner, or hear a drunk getting loud, or witness somebody urinating on the sidewalk, it doesn't require too much effort to distance yourself from the situation. You can turn around and walk away. You can cross the street. Or, if inclined, you could call 911. On an airplane, you have none of these options available to you. You are stuck—with nowhere to go and no hope for the police to come and save you. The only resources at your disposal are your wits and the strangers around you. Take a look at what happened on a flight from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City.
At 9:20 P.M. on August 11, 2000, Southwest Airlines Flight 1763 took off with 121 passengers aboard. The flight was delayed a few minutes, but, according to the captain, it would make up the lost time in the air and still arrive on time.
Once the plane reached its cruising altitude and the flight attendants began serving drinks, a nineteen-year-old man, Jonathan Burton, stood up, took a drink off the tray, and returned to his seat without a word. The flight attendant politely told Burton he should have waited for someone to take his order, but he didn't seem to pay attention. A few minutes later, he was on his feet again and headed to the rear of the plane. Burton rummaged through the cabinets in the galley until he found some peanuts. He grabbed a few bags and returned to his seat.
After a few more minutes, Burton stood up and began pacing up and down the aisle. He walked all the way to the front of the plane, then all the way to the back, and then again toward the cockpit. All of a sudden, without any provocation, Burton raised his voice and kicked in the folding door to the cockpit. A panel of the door opened up and Burton put his head and shoulders through, screaming, "Somebody needs to fly this plane!"
Burton was subsequently pushed out by the pilots and left standing outside of the cockpit.
A flight attendant urged Burton to calm down while a group of passengers escorted him back to his seat. Before getting to his row, Burton was confronted by several passengers in an exit row.
Suddenly, somebody yelled that Burton was trying to open the emergency door. People jumped over seats to get away from the door. Children started crying. Meanwhile, the passengers escorting Burton forcefully grabbed him and told him to "chill out" and "settle down."
Burton seemed to get ahold of himself and sat down. It seemed that the worst had passed.
Then, as the plane began its descent into Salt Lake City, Burton exploded again without warning, jumping up, throwing punches, and spitting on those around him. Several men began fighting with Burton. He decked one of them with a clean uppercut to the jaw. Others grabbed his arms and legs, stretched him out, and pinned him on the floor. At least four guys stood or sat on his limbs, occasionally stepping on Burton or kicking him to keep the muscular young man subdued.
When the plane finally landed in Salt Lake City, police officers who boarded the plane found Burton unconscious in the aisle, with five or six people restraining him. Passengers had their feet on his head, throat, and right arm. Another held his left arm. Burton was bleeding from the mouth with a "huge knot" and "discoloration" on his forehead, as well as contusions on his chest. He was, however, breathing, the police reported.
Police placed handcuffs on Burton's motionless body as passengers warned that Burton would fight again if he came around. Paramedics tended to the bloody passengers and to Burton, but he was declared dead at the local emergency room just after midnight.
Immediately after the incident, there was speculation that Burton died from a drug-induced heart attack. However, further investigation by Utah's chief medical examiner revealed the death a homicide by suffocation. Yet after a full and complete FBI investigation, U.S. Attorney Paul Warner declined to press charges against any of the passengers.
"We determined there wasn't sufficient evidence to sustain a criminal charge," said Warner.
Through his spokesperson, Warner continued: "The call was made after considering whether they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that there was criminal conduct involved in the way those passengers reacted. The U.S. Attorney doesn't believe there was [criminal conduct]."
How would you have reacted had a passenger like Jonathan Burton been on your last flight? The authors consider ourselves pacifists to the infinite degree. Yet there is a part of both of us that really empathizes with those passengers. And, although it is hard to admit, there is another part of us, within our guts, that is almost glad they did what they did. We realize the young man had his whole life ahead of him. Still, when we think about the number of people he could have killed, the number of lives he could have ruined, we sometimes believe that we would have acted the same way those passengers did.
"DISRUPTIVE PASSENGER BEHAVIOR"
VERSUS "INTERFERENCE WITH FLIGHT CREW"
VERSUS "AIR RAGE"
For years, the aviation industry, organizations that represent airline employees, and governmental agencies have wrestled with creating standardized language to describe the wide range of behaviors exhibited by those who act out on airplanes or in airports. As a result, misbehavior on the part of airline travelers has been described using myriad terms. The most prevalent are disruptive passenger behavior, interference with flight crew, and air rage.
Disruptive passenger behavior is a term widely used by leading global organizations like the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF), which represents pilots' and flight attendants' unions all over the world. The ITF defines disruptive passenger behavior as:
Any behavior on board an aircraft which interferes with the cabin crew in the conduct of their duties, disrupts the safe operation of an aircraft, or risks the safety of occupants onboard an aircraft, excluding premeditated acts of sabotage or terrorism.
Organizations like the ITF focus almost exclusively on what happens on board the aircraft. This perspective is quite understandable since they represent pilots and cabin crews. As a result, the ITF is primarily interested in knowing what prevents standard safety and security measures from being taken; in other words, those situations that are almost unique to aviation: for example, the lack of escape routes or reinforcements that crews face in flight, the legal complexity associated with acts committed on board aircraft, and the serious risks to the safety of passengers that they pose.
Interference with flight crew is the term the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses. As the agency that serves at the forefront of aviation jurisdiction for the U.S. government, the FAA is entrusted to enforce the Federal Airline Regulations (FARs). The laws and definitions concerning passenger misconduct on all U.S. carriers and on all flights coming to or departing from the United States are spelled out as follows:
An individual on an aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States who, by assaulting or intimidating a flight crew member or flight attendant of the aircraft, interferes with the performance of the duties of the member or attendant or lessens the ability of the member or attendant to perform those duties, shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.
Until quite recently, the U.S. Federal Code only placed a priority on passenger behavior directed toward flight crews while on board an aircraft. In May of 2000, the code was amended to include "any other individual on the aircraft" as well. However, within the statute, there is still no regard for behavior directed toward other nonflight personnel, i.e., gate agents, counter agents, and customer service representatives. Moreover, the statute only applies to an aircraft when the doors are closed. It has nothing to say about passenger behavior on the jetway, in the gate area, or throughout the rest of the airport. As we will explore later on, this ambiguity in the law is causing a tremendous amount of confusion for airline staff and law enforcement agencies that have to respond to air rage incidents outside of an aircraft.
Unlike the specific, very legalistic definitions offered by disruptive passenger behavior and interference with flight crew, air rage has become a catchall phrase for any and all aberrant behavior surrounding the air travel experience. Air rage seems to encompass a much broader scope of experiences than merely what passengers do aboard an aircraft. Air rage and the behaviors it embodies often start and end beyond the closed doors of a commercial airplane.
In fact, some of the more violent and bizarre incidents of passenger misbehavior have had their origins at the departure gate or the ticket counter.
On July 22, 1999, before boarding a plane in Newark, an irate passenger slammed the head of the Continental gate agent to the ground, breaking two bones in his neck. The passenger was traveling with his in-laws and five children to Orlando, en route to a Disney World vacation. One of the children ran through the waiting area onto the jetway. The gate agent turned to stop the child when he accidentally bumped into the passenger's wife, who was also chasing her child. The attacker allegedly grabbed the gate agent, put him in a headlock, and threw him to the ground—causing the gate agent to permanently lose half the mobility in his neck. The attacker was arrested, charged with aggravated assault, and later acquitted.
There was an arrest in this case, although the local police, not the FAA, handled it, because the gate agent was a member of the ground crew rather than the flight crew. However, in far too many cases, aberrant passenger behavior is allowed to go unpunished because it falls outside the realm of the federal statute.
While waiting to check in for her flight from San Diego, a woman traveling with two small children sprayed breast milk on a customer service representative because she was told to unplug her breast pump. The electrical cord connected to the breast pump ran across a high-traffic aisle in the gate area and was causing other passengers to trip. When first asked to unplug the cord, the woman said her newborn had not eaten for three hours. Understanding the situation, the customer service agent responded calmly, asking the woman to complete her task as soon as possible. After more than thirty minutes, the customer service representative returned and asked the woman to discontinue the use of the breast pump. The woman, indignant about the request, removed the breast pump from her chest and proceeded to squirt breast milk at the customer service representative. Local police were called, but after a few minutes they decided not to press charges because no interference with flight crew had taken place.
During the boarding of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Reno, a man attacked and stabbed a woman he apparently did not know as the two were walking down the jetway. The man, who had flown from Seattle, knifed the woman in the back with a three-inch blade. Other passengers reportedly subdued the man until police arrived. The weapon was described as a Swiss army knife and was the kind that most likely would not be confiscated during the security check. Fortunately, the woman, who suffered multiple injuries to her back, survived. Police described the incident as "bizarre."
Although all of these incidents fall outside the very legalistic bounds of disruptive passenger behavior and interference with a flight crew, they more than qualify as instances of air rage.
WHAT IS AIR RAGE?
Like other difficult-to-define human activities, air rage may take on any number of shapes, sizes, or forms. But in the end, it is a type of behavior that is abnormal, aberrant, or abusive within the context of generally accepted social norms and values. In other words, when someone acts crazy or menacing.
Whether it is checking in your luggage, courteously answering the security questions, passing through the security checkpoint, waiting patiently in the boarding area, walking calming down the jetway, locating your seat, mindfully storing your carry-on luggage, preparing for takeoff, passing time away quietly, eating an in-flight meal peacefully, disembarking promptly from the airplane, or moving expeditiously through the arrival airport, you as a passenger are expected to do certain things in certain ways that are collectively held as decent and acceptable behavior. Anything beyond those parameters falls into the category of air rage.
Such a categorization may seem like too wide a brush with which to paint the entire airline experience. With literally 1.5 billion passengers flying every year on millions of flights all over the world, it seems intellectually dishonest to group all antisocial behavior on the part of passengers under the umbrella of air rage. Generalizations of this kind beg the question: Isn't air rage an oversimplification that dilutes the real problems surrounding bad passenger conduct? And isn't annoyance and even anger sometimes justified? Moreover, is air rage just a lot of hype and not much else?
On the surface, this would all appear to be true. Maybe air rage is merely a contrived expression to explain the reality that in any instance, a certain number, of human beings will always misbehave—regardless of the situation. Maybe, at the end of the day, air rage is simply a trendy phrase invented by flight attendants, pilots, and, journalists to argue for better pay and working conditions, and, in this case, to sell more books. Yes, this all may be true.
Yet two overriding issues compel us to look deeper, to explore whether air rage is real or not.
THE PREVALENCE OF AIR RAGE
The first compelling issue before us is the prevalence of air rage incidents. Industry reports estimate that 44 percent of all adults in the United States flew on at least one commercial airline trip during the past year. That number is expected to continue rising in the foreseeable future.
As more passengers are flying on more planes every year, the incidents of air rage are increasing exponentially. The "official" numbers from the FAA on its Web site (www.faa.gov) say that 266 cases of interference with flight crew were reported from U.S. carriers in 2000. However, for a number of reasons to be detailed later in this book, the accuracy of this number is clearly in doubt.
If, for a moment, we were to take a look at only FAA-related responses to incidents in the United States, we would find the number of interference with flight crew cases to be simply staggering. During the year 2000, 5,548 individuals employed by the FAA had as one of their duties the requirement to respond to probable incidents involving interference with flight crew. This number includes 1,131 full-time security professionals: air marshals and civil aviation security specialists. The other 4,417 are airway flight standards specialists. The primary responsibilities of these individuals concern aircraft maintenance as well as airline and pilot certification. However, in many areas of the country, they are the only FAA employees available. As a result, they also are given the investigative role in cases of interference with flight crew where no full-time security personnel exist.
After exhaustive examiniation of FAA and FBI case files, local police reports, airline incident and irregularity reports, interviews with cabin and cockpit crews, and communications from the flying public through our Web site, we are convinced that the actual number of interference with flight crew cases approximates ten thousand each year in the United States. This total represents more than 1.7 cases per FAA employee responsible for investigating probable instances of interference with flight crew. This is clearly a staggering disparity from the 266 incidents reported officially to the FAA by the airlines in year 2000.
Even more disconcerting, this number would not have included the fight with the gate agent, the angry woman with the breast pump, or the stabbing in the jetway. Therefore, we can assume the actual number of air rage cases to be much higher.
According to the International Air Transport Association, the global association representing the airline industry, there were some twelve thousand cases of disruptive passenger behavior worldwide in 2000, with more than ten thousand of those occurring on U.S. carriers. Says Senator Bill Frist (R) of Tennessee, "We're witnessing a growing trend in unruly and out-of-control passengers."
During the summer of 1999, the House of Representatives held the first ever hearings on in-flight violence. Legislation was introduced into the Senate to increase fines for those disruptive passengers and to make it easier to arrest in-flight offenders.
Sen. Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, a sponsor of a bill on air rage, says, "There are more than merely hundreds, I think we can say thousands, of these incidents every year.... It's a real serious problem."
For more than twenty years, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), has been the world's foremost authority on crash investigations. The mission of the NTSB is simple: to ascertain the cause or causes of an airline crash. Beyond the dozens of scientists, forensic specialists, and FBI agents on every crash investigation team, it is also the responsibility of the NTSB to determine whether air rage was a contributing factor to the plane's demise.
Lloyd's of London, through its subsidiaries Brockbank Syndicate Management Ltd. and Aon Group Limited, have launched the first air rage insurance coverage. The policy will indemnify airlines for the cost of diverting an airplane and interrupting a flight should the pilot consider it necessary to land and eject an unruly passenger. The policy will also pay for injuries caused to the crew or other passengers by the offending person or persons and will pay an amount to compensate passengers for time, trouble, and inconvenience suffered.
Because of the scope and magnitude of the problem, air rage has gone from being an unspoken problem that the airlines would not publicly address, in part out of concern about driving away revenue, to one that they are being forced to confront. The management of airlines is now being compelled to recognize publicly what governments, passengers, civil aviation authorities, flight attendants, and pilots have known for quite a while: air rage poses one of the most serious threats to the safety and security of the flying public today.
Air rage has become so prevalent and pervasive that even celebrities are getting caught up in the mix.
On an American flight from Dallas to Miami, tennis starlet Anna Kournikova caused a commotion, forcing the pilot and police to intervene. The crew told police that Kournikova, age eighteen, refused to put her miniature Doberman pincher in its carrying case, as federal law requires. According to Major Mike Hammersmith of Miami-Dade police, Kournikova and her mother, Alia, argued at length with flight attendants about the dog during the flight. As a result, the pilot had to leave the cockpit to settle the situation. At the crew's request, police met the plane when it landed in Miami.
Professional motorcycle racers Nicky Hayden and Roger Lee Hayden are under investigation from the FBI regarding their alleged misbehavior on a Northwest flight from Memphis to Owensboro, Kentucky. Ten of the commuter plane's sixteen passengers, who included the racing Haydens as well as family members and friends, were detained by Davies County sheriff's deputies after the pilot and flight attendant said the group was unruly during the trip. The pilot called for police to meet the plane when it landed because the group was purportedly throwing things at flight attendant Cindy Salsbery and calling her names, including obscenities.
Excerpted from AIR RAGE by ANONYMOUS AND ANDREW R. THOMAS. Copyright © 2001 by Anonymous and Andrew R. Thomas. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | 9 | |
| Introduction | 11 | |
| 1. | The Phenomenon of Air Rage | 15 |
| 2. | The Broken System | 29 |
| 3. | Alcohol and Drugs | 43 |
| 4. | Mental Illness | 63 |
| 5. | The Advent of Cattle Class | 81 |
| 6. | Who's Reporting Air Rage? | 101 |
| 7. | The Lack of Consequences | 115 |
| 8. | Air Rage versus Air Terrorism | 129 |
| 9. | Actions to Reduce Air Rage | 147 |
| Afterword | 155 | |
| Notes | 157 | |
| Appendix A. | Notice of U.S. Federal Regulation Violation | 163 |
| Appendix B. | FAA Advisory Circular 120-65 | 165 |
| Appendix C. | Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) Part 108--Airplane Operator Security | 179 |
| Appendix D. | Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) Part 129--Foreign Air Carrier Security | 211 |
| Appendix E. | Selected Provisions of the Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act of 1996 | 227 |
| Appendix F. | Compilation of Selected Aviation Laws | 238 |
| Appendix G. | Answers to Commonly Asked Airline Security Questions | 266 |
| Index | 269 |